What are
/r/hobbygamedev's
favorite Products & Services?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
The most popular Services mentioned in /r/hobbygamedev:
Game Jolt
Unity
Unreal Engine
Google Drive
Game-Icons
ClickTeam Fusion
Phaser
Mixpanel
bfxr
Internet Archive
Aseprite
Tile Studio
Rust
Kongregate
Codecademy
The most popular Android Apps mentioned in /r/hobbygamedev:
Nothing But Space
QuaderTrash VR
Sato Soroban
The most popular reviews in /r/hobbygamedev:
A Loooong time ago, I found this ugly yellow book called "How to make your own computer games". That night I wrote my first BASIC game called "The Dragons Cave" which I actually remade recently...
http://www.kongregate.com/games/McTeddyGames/dragons-cave
Since then I've learned a little bit each day for almost 20 years. I've programmed hundreds of games, shipped a couple wii titles, board game etc.
It's actually weird as ****... I don't actually remember before I could program. It's been a part of me for such a long time.
Ten cards with a back option. There's buffer around these, but they are meant to be treated as 64px squares. And a background option.
These are pretty easy to make - I found it harder to think up images than create them. If you'd like specific graphics for effects or theme, or if these aren't to your liking, I'm happy to keep at it.
Currently using http://phaser.io/ alot. Personally I feel web technologies, that is HTML5/CSS/Javascript, are so versatile and flexible at the moment that It is the future. As for the performance concerns? See: Duelyst. Beautiful game, being developed in HTML5.
Trying to recreate old-style games teaches techniques, similar to art students trying to recreate old paintings.
Another old game that might be relatable to your plane codebase is River Raid by Carol Shaw:
https://archive.org/details/atari_2600_river_raid_1982_activision_carol_shaw_ax-020_ax-020-04
Updated here.
The game-icons.net ones mentioned in the thread are nice and crisp and already themed. They obviously don't go very well with what I've done, but maybe consider using those instead?
Just remembered a nice FPS tutorial I found on the Unity learn site here. He has the shooting ray cast originating from the camera, which I guess is where I saw it. (The relevant bit is at roughly 1hr in)
TL;DR: I can lead a small project. Support needed for graphics, sound and music. I'll do the coding. It'll be a browser game.
Idea: I saw the awesome icon collection in game-icons.net. I want to make use of them as main game assets. I have a find the pairs game with random generated levels type game in my mind. Idea can be evolved with contributions, provided that scope stays simple. I'll have the final word on the game mechanics.
Engine: I'll use impactjs and do the main coding. It's a 2D game engine based on javascript and works in the browser. I think for this simplicity one coder is enough. We can host the game on the web and contributions etc.. will be easy to upload and test on-the-fly.
Assitance needed: At least 2 people. 1 for Music, sounds 1 for 2D basic graphics (intro screen, score screen, main game). Ofcourse, if the artists talk to each other about the general mood of the game, it'd be nice. In the testing phase, I expect active participation (translate: play your game over and over) Btw. I really liked the idea of live Cello <wink> Johnnicholas.
I have a day-job and a family. So I'll be working mainly at some nights and in the weekend.
Milestones and deadlines (based on Chris's suggestion): * 11.04.2014: Game design * 20.04.2014: Coding & asset creation * 03.05.2014: Testing & Bugfix & Polish * 04.05.2014: Ship
I can submit the game in a platform like Kongregate, regardless of the final quality, provided that it's completed and playable. So we can sit back and gaze our little creation with awe in the end :)
Bonus: If the contributers (and you , Chris) also approve and the final quality is good enough, I can even submit it to Apple Store and Google Play as a free game. But it'll take some time to adjust.
Very nice website design. These are just thoughts from a quick pass, so don't take them too seriously; I hope they help:
One thing I like to see as soon as possible is sample code, possibly annotated. Something like this is what I'm referring to. Selecting my language of choice and seeing something like that is always the first thing I'm looking for when delving into the docs to decide if this tool is a good fit for my project.
Another thing you might consider is to show some nice sample graphs; something that makes me say "ooh, I wonder what my game's graph would look like".
Last critique I can think of is that the three sections "MULTI-PLATFORM CLIENT", "LIMITLESS PROJECTS", "STABILITY" seem almost like filler to me. These are things I would expect from any stat tracker (multi-platform may indeed be worth noting though, since I'd like to see if you have a library for my language/platform of choice).
Now then, my question for you is: why would I use this instead of Mixpanel or others?
I learnt some basic C# a few years ago during a College course but didn't really apply that into making games until recently.
I found http://www.codecademy.com/ to be really useful in getting back up to scratch with syntax and typing in code again. Any tutorials that focus on practical work is always good.
But really just trying to build things has been the most use for me. Unity is a great engine to learn scripting and programming because the amount of online support and community between devs is really great. Resources are plentiful with example scripts which are for reference. Since then I've just been picking little bits up slowly and surely as I go!
I found this video super useful for getting animations working. Goes into character controls too, plus physics and collision detection a bit.
I haven't worked much on anything since my last game, but I am playing around and prototyping two ideas right now. One is a multiplayer tower defense and the other is taking a type of game that does not work as a turn based game and trying to make it turn based.
We finally released our game Hoard Lord on Google Play!
It's been 4 long years of development as we made and then attempted to recover from every "first commercial game" mistake along the way, haha! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hdCheese.hoardLord.android&hl=en
Good idea! I don't necessarily have any specifically related to game development off the top of my head, but are a few from Steve McConnell's Code Complete (2nd edition) that tie into programming:
"Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber defined a "wicked" problem as one that could be clearly defined only by solving it, or by solving part of it (1973). This paradox implies, essentially, that you have to "solve" the problem once in order to clearly define it and then solve it again to create a solution that works." (p.74)
"In summary, a primary goal of software design and construction is conquering complexity. The motivation behind many programming practices is to reduce a program's complexity, and reducing complexity is arguably the most important key to being an effective programmer." (p.839)
My curiosity was built through multiple really scattered small bits of exposure to code (making fandom sites in middle school, learning small chunks of code while working in Side FX's Houdini in college, trying to make a small and really terrible game in flash just to see if I could) but the first time I sat down and seriously started learning was with the Head First Java book. It makes everything really easy to digest and has some really fun humor throughout. From there I started working through some of the free online classes posted by Stanford and the stuff on Coursera and working on as many projects as I could. Now I'm back in school to continue focusing on getting better.
I actually tried making an online game in middle school as well and had absolutely no idea what I was doing. All I knew was I wanted Neopets for Digimon to be a thing that existed. I had it set up to email me whenever a user bought something or spun the daily wheel, etc and I'd go in and manually change things(again, I had no idea how this stuff was supposed to work). Somehow I actually managed to get 3 people to sign up for it and one person even kept playing past the point when I was interested in keeping up with it. I have no idea how that happened. haha
I've made 2 games this year. One for a client - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Cenobium.Soroban
Another for profit - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=808104405
What idea do you have in mind?
Google Play Store here :)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.YSNGames.HauntingFilms
APP Store here :)
Google Play Store here :)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.YSNGames.StringPop&hl=en&gl=US
APP Store here :)
Hey guys, Alec here, I've worked on my game for the last 6 years, using my spare time and scarce resources... this week I completed my backlog and was able to fix several bugs and my game is now published on Google Play.
It's been a very long journey... but in the end, it was just the beginning...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blueprints.soba
My game is called Stars of Hope. It's set in a not-so-distant future 2099, where humankind gets attacked by an alien force.
In Stars of Hope, you play the role of the Squadron Leader, selecting your team, fitting your ships, calling targets, and trying to survive.
There are basically 2 modes of gameplay.
Warfronts - where you need to battle a number of fights before you can free a planet from the invasion. There are more than 60-star systems with 500+ planets to play, all 3D renderings...
Arena - This is our competitive gameplay. You compete against other Squadron Leaders and need to go up in the ranks to become #1. This is not a multiplayer battle, but we use player data to simulate player behavior and capabilities.
There are 86 spaceship types for you to choose from. You can customize it with different equipment, and colors.
I expect up to 300h of gameplay for the Warfronts and unlimited gameplay for the Arena.
Hey guys, Alec here, I've worked on my game for the last 6 years, using my spare time and scarce resources... this week I completed my backlog and was able to fix several bugs and my game is now published on Google Play.
It's been a very long journey... but in the end, it was just the beginning...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blueprints.soba
My game is called Stars of Hope. It's set in a not-so-distant future 2099, where humankind gets attacked by an alien force.
In Stars of Hope, you play the role of the Squadron Leader, selecting your team, fitting your ships, calling targets, and trying to survive.
There are basically 2 modes of gameplay.
Warfronts - where you need to battle a number of fights before you can free a planet from the invasion. There are more than 60-star systems with 500+ planets to play, all 3D renderings...
Arena - This is our competitive gameplay. You compete against other Squadron Leaders and need to go up in the ranks to become #1. This is not a multiplayer battle, but we use player data to simulate player behavior and capabilities.
There are 86 spaceship types for you to choose from. You can customize it with different equipment, and colors.
I expect up to 300h of gameplay for the Warfronts and unlimited gameplay for the Arena.
I'm building this game where the level is generated by the music. You can use any mp3s, but I would like to ship the game with some music so the player doesn't have to have mp3 on his phone to try it.
Any tips to reach musicians will help a lot :)
​
You can download the beta here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mr.run
You can also join me on discord here:
The community around Rust gamedev right now is incredibly passionate, friendly, and helpful whether that be on Discord, IRC, or Reddit. C++ tends to be more old guard feeling.
There are far more resources and libraries for gamedev in C++. A Rust library for math today might be completely different or obsolete a couple months later.
Making projects easily buildable by others and cross-platform so far has been dead simple with Rust. It amounts to git clone & cargo run. C++ has always amounted to copying a bunch of dll's, modifying your PATH, and sacrificing a goat in order to get a project to build.
Overall, I've really enjoyed using Rust for gamedev.
The Rust team also interviewed Rust gamedev Chucklefish you should checkout: https://www.rust-lang.org/pdfs/Rust-Chucklefish-Whitepaper.pdf
Hey man and welcome to the group! Congratz on finishing your one game a month projects and keep it up! Really liking the retro pixel artwork.
On a side note have you tried giving phaser a try? Since you're getting into html5 development.
Play around with Tiled to see what feels like must-haves for your game?
Very difficult to say without knowing exactly what makes your maps special, but one feature I really like in Tiled is that I can drag to mark a rectangle of tiles and then stamp that entire rectangle on the map instead of just single tiles. So the tile-set can be prepared with some multi-tile graphics things that are meant to be drawn together. Also the various built-in terrain-features are probably great for making maps that have different areas of terrain that need to fit together properly at the borders and you do not want to manually put the correct tiles everywhere for them to connect.
For what it's worth:
> I do better with C# than C++
> mostly because of the wide variety of platforms that it supports still.
I'm not trying to argue for one or the other, just figured that info seemed relevant :)
I'm happy to announce that I released my first game on Google Play last night ! Unfortunately I had to change the name due to Google's restrictions.
But if you have an android phone and a cardboard viewer you can give it a try: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bader.vr.quadertrash
Thanks for all your comments, guys, just a quick update: Nothing But Space is also available on the Google Play Store, completely free with no ads, with some changes compared to the PC version, if you want to check it out:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Aemilius.NothingButSpace